Manpower Trimming Strategy at Wipro: Replacing Human Employees with Software Robots

The end of the year 2014 saw Wipro Ltd., India’s third largest software company , announce its plans to cut down its existing workforce with the vision of having a streamlined employee base. The software giant, which had 146,000 employees on its payroll in 2014, planned to reduce its employee headcount to 100,000 by 2016. The decision to reduce the workforce came in the wake of the gradual change in the corporate philosophy of most software firms of ‘doing more with less’. Industry observers largely attributed this change to the rise in popularity of automated business solutions, such as IBM’s Watson and IPSoft’s Amelia , due to which the involvement of humans in repetitive information technology (IT) functions was steadily becoming redundant...